Any chance you, or someone you know owns a dongle that is compatible with an iPhone 6 or iPad mini connection?? I would love to borrow one for my presentation in Seattle!

No, but I have something EVEN BETTER!

I got this question from one of my favorite people last week. She was selected to present at a conference, and is always willing and excited to share ways of integrating technology into music education. For this and many other reasons, I would help this lady in any way I can! As it turns out, the timing of her question could not have been better. My colleague Traci and I were just about to head to Seattle ourselves to present at the Northwest Council for Computers in Education (NCCE) annual conference. Since both of us were also planning presentations that demonstrated cool stuff on our iOS devices, neither of us wanted to be left at the mercy of the network, either. And so, running short on time, we went to Best Buy to find the dongle in question. To make a long, adventurous story short, we never did find any of those adapters. The ones we did buy turned out to be the wrong thing, and we had to take them back. So, there's that.

So, flash forward a couple days to NCCE Day 1. As we should have assumed based on every conference we've attended or hosted in the last year, the Internet at the conference center in Seattle was very not-workish. Presenters and attendees alike struggled with their connections all day, and it made for some pretty frustrated people. And so, that night, preparing for our Day 2 presentation, my co-presenter Shaundel and I sat in our hotel room discussing the fact that if the Internet didn't work, then there's no way Reflector would work. If Reflector didn't work, then there would go a good chunk of our presentation, and so there we were at 10:30 PM, hurriedly trying to create an Internet-proof back up plan in Keynote.

In trying to find some other way to record our iPad screens, we Googled "how to record your iPad screen" thinking that we could simply upload the videos to our Keynote presentation (no Internet required) and pretend we were doing it live. As it turns out, we stumbled upon a set of instructions explaining how your lightning power adapter cord with the QuickTime player to reflect!

YES. This one. The one that came with your device!!

WHAT?!?!?!?!

​YES!

Plug your iPad/iPhone into your computer. Tell them to trust each other if either device asks.

Quit iTunes and/or Photos when they open (I'll tell you how to fix that in a minute).

Go to Finder, open a new window, click on Applications, and scroll down to QuickTime Player. Drag that icon to your dock - you're going to want it there forever!!

Open the QuickTime Player. Click File, New Movie Recording. Your webcam will start running - don't freak out when you see YOU staring back at yourself.

Right next to the little red "record" button, there's a tiny downward-pointing arrow. Click it.

See your iPad/iPhone listed there? Click it!

Drop your lower jaw. Gasp. Thank me for telling you this.

SO here's part two. Now that we know this works, it's pretty annoying when iTunes and Photos automatically open as soon as you plug in your device. You can turn this off (and you'll probably want to if you decide to do this very often, which I totally will).

iTunes: Plug in your device; when it automatically opens iTunes, select your device, scroll down, and unselect either "Open iTunes when this iPhone is connected" or "Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected" (depending on your iTunes software version).

Photos: Now go over to Photos. Right at the top of the window, you'll see a box that says "Open Photos for this device" - uncheck it.

I haven't been this excited about a discovery in a LONG time! YAY for those necessary learning moments!